at last: the "THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION" DIGITAL ARTBOOK w/ a NEW INTRODUCTION {official Thing} (Patreon)

(patrons only)

hallo loves!!!! THING DAY!

TL;DR: when i put out my last album "there will be no intermission", i made a book of stories and photography, too. and now, for patrons only, the digital artbook in PDF form is HERE, with new content and a brand-new introduction (by me). lo-res download is here, hi-res download is here.

it's 109 pages with zillions of hyperlinks, incredible images, and it's just fucking lovely, the end.

please let me know what you think of the whole project in comments. i'm reading.

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this photo appears as the cover of the digital version of the book and on the cover of the patron-only hardcover edition of the book, photographed by kahn & selesnick

dear god. 

AT LONG LAST.  i was hoping to put this digital book version out as a patreon Thing right after the world tour ended...in march....and we know what happened. 

i have been promising this project for months and months, and as usual it's been a race to the finish to actually get the fucker out the door. 

hayley, bless her soul (she's been mostly locked in her apartment in queens, NYC, for months), our upstate NY designer andrew nelson, and the *whole* team have been working on this project all year and all month - it was a real herculean task - and it's DONE...what a relief. and i'm so excited to share....we all are.

even if you already bought the "there will be no intermission" artbook online or at a show, this is a whole new beast...it includes literally hundreds of hyperlinks, backstory and new content. 

i wrote the new introduction last week, and it's a piece of writing i am very proud of...who knew i'd be writing it in this context. here is how it starts.

here's some of the text....

When I was eighteen years old, I took a photograph of myself. It was 1994, and I was fulfilling an assignment for a college photography course. Introduction to Photography. I had a nice camera. The camera had a timer. The college had a big white room—“the light studio”—that you could book ahead of time. I was alone in there, drunk on discovering the power of the selfie. I wouldn’t be able to develop the negatives into prints in the darkroom for another week, but I could use my fast-forward imagination and see the prints in my head. I cannot remember if I had any sort of plan before showing up in that white room, or if I had taken any time to plot out the shots I would take. If I were to venture a guess: no. I probably looked around my concrete dorm room, grabbed the most visually arresting items I could see, and threw them in my bag before heading off.

Looking back at those shots is funny. 

I took lots of pictures of myself, doing things and holding things. I dressed up in bloodied ballerina clothes and danced around with a blow-up skeleton. I took off my clothes and poured milk all over my body, pretending to nurse an invisible baby. I lay down on the floor, naked, and poured a pint of assorted beads and junk jewelry on the floor to give the appearance of vomiting a treasury of jewels onto the clean white floor. I rolled my eyes back in my head as the shutter went off, pretending to be dead.

Why did I think any of this was a good idea at the time? What made me think that this was…art? There’s certainly a part of me that could roll my eyes again, this time out of a kind of deep embarrassment that I was a textbook “pretentious art college kid.” Or I could look deeper. What was eighteen-year-old me trying to say? I knew that my photo teacher and my fellow students would see these photographs: they’d all be critiqued in the weeks to come. There was an audience. 

So why show them…this?

why indeed.....download the book to read the rest. 

truth be told, i am so proud of this new introduction (i wrote it only a week ago) as a piece of stand-alone writing that i can't imagine this having gone any other way. 

some things, timing-wise, are just meant to be. maybe...everything is meant to be. lately, i'm having to believe that to my core.

..............

photo by allan amato

i loved making this book as much as i loved making the record.

in a way, it taught me more...about letting go, about process, about catharsis.

it is, really, one of my favorite things i've ever made.

i am very grateful to my whole team and especially to the three photographers: Kahn & Selesnik, Allan Amato and Stephanie Zakas. they took me (literally) to whole new places.

top left machete photo by kahn & selesnick, right machete photo with ash by allan amato

before i say more, gimme a real authentic second.

hello, human.

greetings from hastings, aotearoa new zealand, where i haven’t showered in quite a few days, am scrambling to get this damn project out before the end of the 31st in the states so we can hit budget targets….and i am making hayley, in queens, laugh (hopefully) as we speak via text as i send her pictures of how i am trying to keep ash occupied (porridge! chocolate! bribes! star wars toys!) while i juggle sending this post. 

this is what single-mothering on your own for a weekend at the end of a month with gazillions of overdue patreon projects looks like. please compare and contrast to the fancy dressed up lady in the following photographs. dear ones…i’ll never bullshit you. 

it’s just not that fucking glamorous most of the time.

i could choose to be angry and resentful about all this and i’m just…not. i’m grateful that this is MY particular shitshow. it’s my shitshow and i’ll cry with joy if i want to!!!

and….this is the theme of the book, people.

this is it.

this is the theme of all-life.

photos by kahn & selesnick

when i released "there will be no intermission", the album, i also released a BOOK. today, the digital/PDF version of the "there will be no intermission artbook" is READY, for patrons only. please go download it and please read it in the bath with a glass of wine or cup of tea and have a hanky handy so you can have a nice cry.

note that this is a large file, its about 150 MB in size and may take a few minutes to download depending on your internet speed. so we have the full high res version and a compressed version that's smaller which would be ideal for folks on slow internet or if you plan to read on a small screen like a mobile phone.  

DOWNLOAD THE HIGH-RES DIGITAL BOOK (file size: 149 MB):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fe7l86xoutdozcl/TWBNI%208%205x11%20version%207-31-20%20HiRez.pdf?dl=0

and for those of you on slower internet
DOWNLOAD THE LOWER-RES VERSION OF THE BOOK (file size: 43 MB):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ql1qyztw2n7wqpl/TWBNI%208%205x11%20version%207-31-20%20LoRez.pdf?dl=0

while you can certainly download this and read it offline, this is best viewed on a device with internet connection as this digital version of the book is annotated with hyperlinks which will require an internet connection to open. 

this is what makes the new version of the book awesome. don't miss out.

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CAN I SHARE THIS WITH THE WORLD?

well, yes!

this digital edition of the book, and therefore this essay, is patron-only.

you know me. i'm not a punisher when it comes to you sharing these links privately with people you think might love the art.... just don't paste the download link openly to facebook and stuff.

and, yes yes yes!!!! feel free to share bits of the photos, quotes, or whole chunks of text online and lead/link people back to this patron-only post....and encourage them to join the patreon (for $1) to get it. i am hoping that this is part of how we can encourage people to hop on the patreon-train. please make sure you credit and tag the photographers if you're sharing shots online!!! it means so much to them.

on instagram, tag:  

Kahn & Selesnick - @kahnselesnick
Allan Amato - @allanamato
Stephanie Zakas - @icelandadventureweddings

there is no publisher, there is no marketing team.

you're my promo-army. it's just us.

photos by kahn & selesnick

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here it is, again, for you to download in PDF form:

DOWNLOAD THE HIGH-RES VERSION OF THE BOOK (149 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/fe7l86xoutdozcl/TWBNI%208%205x11%20version%207-31-20%20HiRez.pdf?dl=0

for those of you on slower internet,
DOWNLOAD the LOWER RES VERSION (43 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ql1qyztw2n7wqpl/TWBNI%208%205x11%20version%207-31-20%20LoRez.pdf?dl=0

again, these links are patron-only, but if you want to share this download with a friend because you think the book will resonate, i will not punish or try to stop you. i'll even encourage you. i wrote it and made it to be READ and LOVED. but again, please...consider asking them, in exchange, to join the patreon. it helps me. you know.

......

and here is where i say:

thank you.

thank you for funding me so that i can make art this GRAND without having to answer to censors or labels or corporate overlords. thank you for believing in me while i feel my way through the dark, using music, photography and writing to peel away the dark. 

thank you for helping me be the freest incarnation of me that i can possibly imagine.

it is important to keep reminding you all of this. i used to do book projects like this because i wanted to...and they would just lose money. i can now manifest the weird stuff i see in my head and actually get paid. it feels so crass on the one hand and is so deeply profound on the other. 

your support has emboldened me, lit me up, and set me off on a path of life i never could have or would have gone down if i had stayed within the system.

you have honestly no idea what it means to me, especially now that there is covid and so many artist's options are so limited.

so, as you read through this book and the new introduction - feel it.

know it. know it good. you funded these essays, these photoshoots, these costumes, these make-up artists, the very gas in the car to get to the places where these pictures were made. 

you helped me do all this, and i don't take it for granted for a fucking second.

......

photo by kahn & selesnick, me with my friend coco karol

a few more pieces of housekeeping.

many people have been asking IF and WHERE they can buy an actual physical copy of the book. 

the hardcover version was available to patrons only, but my guess is that if you go to the shadowbox (here's a thread) someone might be willing to part with one...you may also be able to find it on ebay/etc.

the softcover version, which was the one i was selling at the merch desk through all of 2019 on the tour, is still available in ALL THREE merch stores: australian merch shop, UK/EU merch shop (all the artbooks are signed in this store) and american merch shop. 

all of these online stores ship internationally. 

......

there's also the record itself, and if you're new to me and to the book, you may want to listen to it, since it's what the book is all about. you can find in all my merch stores (linked above).... 

and since many of you will be NEW to the patreon, please don't forget that you are entitled to a free download of the album itself as one of my patrons!

here's the post where you can still download it for free:

"THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION" HAS COME. your download codes. {official Thing} 

(fun fact: you can also view the "there will be no intermission" tag on patreon to view album related posts on patreon, that's always a fun little rabbit-hole.)

.........

and, for public sharing, in case you're new to the record and want to shout about it from the rooftops:...

the album on Bandcamp....
https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/album/there-will-be-no-intermission

the album on Spotify....
https://open.spotify.com/album/7xvctClkVYHmgKEEdAbSjc?si=vUGM-J-nTOu9mLNWX03QCA

the album on YouTube....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2iDF6y0yi4&list=PLdCjn28n1Ao_nrjtRdaEuQRyTZJKcc4Ol

.........

even deeper dive?

here's some more photos of the making of the artbook.

photo by hayley rosenblum

it started with me handwriting annotations with sharpie into a physical copy of the book, i left notes for hayley about what extra photos i wanted to include, what links i wanted to share, what topics for her to research to share in the annotations (old dresden dolls footage, news stories etc.).....

we tried making comments in a collaborative dropbox file.... it was clunky and difficult to collaborate the way we needed to...

then hayley moved the team collaboration to a shared spreadsheet, where she hand typed my 420 hand written annotations and marked where they occurred in the book. she worked with bill h to compile all the links in a spreadsheet for andrew nelson, the physical and digital book designer, to add and build into the document that would become the digital artbook:

i wrote the new introduction in warp speed last week and sent it to copy editor, carol krol, who proofed it with a quick turnaround (thank you, carol!)... 

(side note: i asked her to show me her work to TEACH ME so i could learn what's proper grammar and fix some bad habits. she sent back the text with her notes marked up). thought you might wanna see that....

when we were getting read to print the physical version of the book (last december) i opened up a form for you to opt-in to have your names included in the patron thank you section and, back then, over 8,000 of you opted in. earlier this month, i re-opened the opt-in for more patrons to have their name included if they missed it the first time around. we had OVER 10,000 patrons in total opt in to be thanked in the digital version of the book.

........

we may end up editing this further and adding more to it to make additional versions of the digital pdf. 

hayley started a thread on the shadowbox to get your feedback, SO....if you notice anything strange or have ideas of things you'd like me to add to a future edition, please share!!!! the internet moves fast and sometimes videos or articles are taken down so it's possible some links may eventually break, so let us know...even five weeks from now if you see something out of place or broken...

https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/twbni-artbook-digital-version-official-patron-only-thing/4389/2

here's a fun screenshot: since posting a few weeks ago, over 10,000 of you opted in to have your name included in the patron thank-you section, look how beautiful this is, 11 pages of names!!!!!

i love you.

i love making art this way.

i love what we've done.

i love what we're doing.

and i....thank you all. so deeply.

i hope you love this project and the new introduction.

again: please let me know what you think of the whole project in comments. i'm reading.

from my art-heart to you,

AFP

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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and

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol.

2. see All the Things i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

3. JOIN THE SHADOWBOX COMMUNITY FORUM, find your people, and discuss everything: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/

4. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff (at least up until a few years ago, this desperately needs updating) on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

5. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer: patronhelp@amandapalmer.net